The communications revolution of the 1990's has led to an explosion of growth in the wireless communications field. Wireless telephones, personal communications services (PCS) devices, and wireless computer networks are just a few of the products of this revolution. One problem with this proliferation of wireless technology is the increasing need for faster transmission rates between nodes in a wireless network. Regardless of whether data or voice transmissions are being made, the encoded transmissions need to be decoded faster so that the decoding process does not become the bottleneck in the system.
One method of decoding which has gained wide acceptance is the so called Viterbi method or algorithm. In this trellis-based method, convolutionally encoded data sets are sequentially decoded by determining the states through which the encoded data sets passed through in its encoding procedure. By following this path, the original unencoded set of data bits can be found. This process usually requires large amounts of memory as each state has to be stored and processed. Furthermore, such a process can be time consuming and, therefore, be a hindrance to higher transmission rates.
There is therefore a need for methods and/or devices which allow for quicker determination of the unencoded set of data bits. Ideally, such a solution should also require less resources.